Western Standard - April 07, 2025


The Western Standard is now FREE for the rest of the election

Topics
Western Standard free election
Mentioned
Jen Hodgson Westerner Flinflon
Week 2. Has the Conservative bleeding stopped？ Canada (or Alberta) as the 51st State？

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

168.87

Word count

481

Sentence count

25


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

As of right now, we are making The Western Standard completely free for everyone, all the way until Election Day. We re able to do that because thousands of Westerners pitched in to donate and offset the cost of foregone new subscriptions and our extra election-related costs.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 As of right now, we are making the Western standard completely free for everyone, all the way until Election Day.
00:00:11.280 We're able to do that because thousands of Westerners pitched in to donate and offset the cost of foregone new subscriptions and our extra election-related costs.
00:00:20.300 It all began last Friday when I was emailed by a few guys in Alberta and BC who pledged to donate $1,000 each if we would remove the paywall for the next month.
00:00:30.900 Their pledges were very generous, but by themselves not enough.
00:00:35.060 But they got me thinking, and so we reached out to our members and asked them to join the original pledges to raise $75,000.
00:00:43.080 And boy, you guys sure stepped up.
00:00:45.340 My staff and I watched over the weekend, and the donations kept coming in, and so I gave the green light last night to take down the paywall effective this morning.
00:00:55.700 This is an opportunity to reach millions of people with independent, straight news, and hard-hitting opinion columns.
00:01:02.320 Last month, in March, we had 2.1 million readers, and that was with the pesky paywall still up.
00:01:08.360 With the Western standard now entirely free for everyone to read, I strongly expect that we'll reach many, many more people.
00:01:15.340 As Western Canada's leading independent media source, we have reporters and columnists scattered everywhere from Victoria, BC to, figuratively at least, Flinflon, Manitoba.
00:01:25.120 But we are a bit short of staff out east.
00:01:27.500 That's why we have hired a temporary new reporter in Ontario, and we're sending one of our Calgary-based reporters, Jen Hodgson, eastward into exile.
00:01:34.820 This is important, because outside of coastal BC and Edmonton, where we already have full-time reporters stationed, this election will not be fought in the West.
00:01:44.900 The party leaders simply won't be spending very much of their time in Calgary, rural Alberta, and pretty much anywhere in Saskatchewan.
00:01:50.820 Instead, they'll be tripping over each other in Ontario, and the GTA in particular.
00:01:57.320 Therefore, it was necessary for us to reallocate some of our resources from the West to the East.
00:02:03.960 And if that sounds familiar, it probably should.
00:02:06.240 The overwhelming majority of Canada's media is headquartered out of the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal triangle.
00:02:12.000 And they reflect the views and the news of the centre, them, to the periphery, us.
00:02:18.880 This was most recently obvious when the legacy media blew gasket every single time that a Westerner piped up with demands of our own.
00:02:27.220 The Western Standard has always seen its mission as sending Western journalists into the lion's den and reporting back to the readers that it serves.
00:02:35.640 I am proud to lead a team of journalists who know who they serve and what our mission is.
00:02:41.260 And I'm grateful to all of you who stepped up to pitch in financially and make it possible for us to make the Western Standard free for this election.
00:02:50.260 Thank you.